1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method of forming an opaque layer, a recording process, an ink set, an ink cartridge, and a recording apparatus.
2. Related Art
In a case of printing on a non-white record medium, such as a chromatic, black, metallic, transparent, or translucent object, it is known a trouble that no satisfactory image quality is obtained because that the background is seen through the image recorded on such a medium. This trouble is noticeable when the concentration of color material used is low and thereby the capability of hiding the background, that is, the hiding property, is low. The trouble can be slightly alleviated by increasing the concentration of the color material, but the background is still seen at portions where the concentration of the color material is low. Consequently, this method is not an essential solution.
It is known a method for preventing the background from being seen in screen printing or gravure printing, when the printing is performed on a record medium such as the above, by printing a white opaque undercoat layer in advance (for example, refer to JP-A-2005-007577). In this method, it is necessary to print the white opaque layer and to dry or solidify the layer before forming an objective image, resulting in an increase in the number of steps. Thus, this method has disadvantages that necessary time and cost are high. Furthermore, this method for hiding the background requires the use of an ink composition containing a pigment at a high concentration and having a high viscosity for imparting a satisfactory degree of whiteness to the undercoat layer. Consequently, it is not necessarily easy to apply the method of hiding the background to an ink-jet recording system. For example, the hiding property of a white ink having a viscosity that can be applied to the ink-jet recording system is insufficient.